I had a dream at one time. I was working my way through this book, and it took me two months, and I was only three quarters of the way through the book, and I thought,
I'll never write this dessert, David. How am I going to get this reading?
And the dream that just sat me up, it wasn't a complicated dream, it was a command. Read more. Read.
So I started reading easier books, and reading books about radio, and reading books about film, and much more popular.
Things that I could get through quickly so that I could find out how did people respond when they saw films,
when people started treating films as something that was serious, a way to tell a serious story, a way to tell a fun story, a way to tell any kind of a story.
That helped me a lot, actually, reading more, rather than focusing on trying to understand really complicated material, and try and relate that.
Try and give it a seriousness based on the seriousness of the literature that I was reading.
Because there certainly was plenty of material to write. It turned out there was plenty to write about in computer games.
Did you actually solve Adventure? No, I never did. I never did. I never did.
Did someone solve it for you? Yes. Jeff Ellman is a professor at UCSD in Linguistics,
and he gave me, he set a program up so that it captured the games that people played.
And I would read their, the way that I actually got through Adventure is, well first of all, he also made it possible for me to read the actual text,
and figure out any text, all text that could be displayed. But I watched the way that people were playing the game.
So I would get printouts of their playing the game. Sometimes I would sit next to them and I'd ask them,
well why did you do this? Or what did you think when you were, when you needed a lantern?
What did you, what did you, I say that because of this lantern.
What were you imagining when you picked up the, when you looked out over that vista?
What did it feel like when you were doing that? What's it feel like to be frustrated?
What happens when you can't go on anymore and you, you know, you're cursing? What are you cursing about there?
Yeah, they just had great reactions. They were wonderful.
So these were subjects who were just...
Computer was so unusual. Most people didn't work on, only computer nerds worked on the computer.
So when people started using it for sociable things, for having fun, that was very different.
I just happened to be at that exact moment. Five years later, I'm sure it was different.
Two years later, it might not have been the same, but I was right there when people were playing.
Playing and interacting and making friends with the play. It's like the difference.
It's like the difference. For me, the difference was between about talking about other people and talking about subjects.
And here was this subject that people were fascinated with. Just, they were so thrilled to be doing it.
And who could they talk to? They could talk to each other and they were having so much...
It was a moment when people were having so much fun. It was a ball. That was really fun.
And I thought, oh, if everybody were doing this, all of society would be better because we'd all be happier.
We'd all play with each other a little bit more. It'd be, you know, like being kids again.
It didn't turn out quite that way.
I even had several children. That was really fun to sit with the kids and talk to them.
I wouldn't ask them what they thought about it. I would ask that.
That was where I started asking, well, what do you imagine that you're wearing? And who are you?
Are you a knight? Do you have a higher purpose? You know, you have to talk to them in a different way.
I guess one of the things that specifically, but I can remember seeing people going crazy,
just sitting there completely involved, having such a good time, chuckling, swearing.
They were just so happy. It looked like they were having a great time.
That's what I remember of my first contact with adventure, that, oh, these people love this.
They are totally involved in it.
I tried to play. I never got beyond opening the grate.
And I found it very frustrating because I'm not a game player.
And at that time, I did have the idea of giving an overview and saying,
look, this computer, the computer is changing the way people are going to read.
It's changing the way people are going to write. It's a brand new medium.
It's like being at the beginning of films, you know, how films really, really changed people.
And I knew that it was different at that time.
I just could tell, oh, this is going to be really exciting.
I didn't see some of the bad things that would come out of it.
But I just knew, oh, this is just like being when radio came about,
or it's just at this moment in time.
It's like being where you have film, where you just see people walking along
and you can't see what kind of story they'll be able to tell with it.
But you could tell, oh, they could do really, really interesting things with it.
What I was interested in was doing an overview and saying,
look, we're right at this moment in time.
We're at the beginning of something. We don't know exactly what's going to become of it.
I was going to do three articles, was going to try and write three articles
and submit that as my dissertation, in lieu of a dissertation.
I was going to write about email, which I thought was just a personal communication,
and I thought it was so much fun because people could, at that time, were role-playing with it.
The second one was newsgroups. I thought that was also fascinating.
My favorite was gardening news, but there were also some pretty wild newsgroups
and groups that had personalities of their own.
And the third one was computer games, and that was actually the least,
what I considered to be the least of the three.
I still don't know which one was the most important. Maybe computer games is.
Well, I'm done.
Now, at the end, the funny odd thing was that I ended up only wishing to finish the dissertation.
That really was my goal. I didn't want to continue with those other two topics.
It just kind of wore me down. But at the beginning, I was excited about it.
I thought, look at these people. Look at them. They are so happy. They're so involved.
This is the life of the mind.
And also, there was one further thing. I never got to think about that.
I never got to develop that idea, and I haven't even now.
But I know, I just sense, that people are going to be different because of playing these games,
because of writing email, because of putting their personality into email.
You know how people put on personas? At that time, email was a game.
And people would write to each other and put on, well, I can only say persona.
So it was like play acting. The email was play acting.
There was a wonderful email. Her name was Arwen, Lady Arwen, and there was a guy who took on the name of Strider.
It was all just a game. It was all a lot of fun with that.
And to see people knowing, this is going to change people.
It's not just that we're playing the games, but by playing these kind of games, we're going to be different people.
And I am sure that young people today are different from my generation, who grew up right at the point when television started.
Like, I'm 55. I was born in 1952. And I can't remember how old we were when we got a TV, but there was no TV before that.
Can you imagine not having TV? Your life would be different.
And we were different because of that, because of watching TV and not sitting down.
Like when I was a little girl, what you did in the evening is you sat down and you read books.
You looked at your picture books, and you did that all evening. You talked with each other.
There were good things and bad things about that.
But it's certainly having the television where everybody sat and watched TV, that changed people.
And I'm just convinced that kids who have grown up using computers all the time for daily tasks as a tool, that the tool has also changed them.
Yeah, I think that might have been the most important question for me, was how is this going to change people?
What's it like to play a game? What's it like to write a letter and get an immediate response to it?
And you put yourself out as one type of person, and you don't have to be that to the next person you write to.
It was just really, really fun and exciting at that time. It was just different, I think.
It wasn't a tool that you use only for writing memos.
It was actually unusual to write memos at that time, using computers. There weren't that many people who used computers.
That was something that I felt at that time that the computers really provided, that playing really provided, that belonging to a musical group really provides for me.
It's a real sense of community. And that sense of community at that time, I don't know if it's continued. Maybe it has and maybe it hasn't.
But I saw that as the possibility, one possibility, that the medium itself could provide for us, is interacting and getting a little bit closer to each other,
even though there are thousands of us, or maybe because there are gazillions of us around, that we're separated from each other.
I still think that that's a wonderful thing about the computers. You really do get to interact.
That was just such a charming, wonderful moment at the beginning. I almost wish I hadn't written a dissertation, because then I would have continued with it.
And I would have had that communication, and gone along with the culture, instead of, oh, that would feel so awful.
I'd have to say that it was something that happened over time, and that I don't know the answer yet.
But it has to do with that question, how is this going to change people? It's changing people, but I don't know how.
I saw, for example, on TV, just glanced at it, Wired Science, something like that, instead of Weird Science, Wired Science.
And I didn't care for the program. I thought, yeah, but I bet that the young people that I work with would love that, rather than the programs that I would like.
Because it was all fast, and glance here, and look there, and look over this, and keep the camera moving at all times.
That's different about younger people today, in my opinion. That's one thing that I noticed a difference with them, that they really like that sparkle and something very quick.
I think that people of my generation, or maybe it's just me, I really like those relationships.
I like it explained, and how does this relate? That's a negative, in my opinion, something that's negative.
And that one of the things about the computers is that that was a way of talking with people, of making a connection with other people, beyond money.
And there was no money involved at that time. Quite the contrary, it kept you from earning a living.
But something about that is so charming and so wonderful to play together, to have this topic of conversation, to have a sense of community.
Even though you might not know these other people, just the fact of playing this game, or writing email, or belonging to Gardening News.
And we had a different personality than these other people who would flame each other.
One time in Gardening News, for example, this news group had a real personality. It was something that you could belong to.
Yeah, sort of that sense of belonging. I could not have put my finger on it at that time.
And maybe I couldn't.